Pandora's Keepers

by Brian Van DeMark

  At first you could hear the sound of the neutron counter, clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Then the clicks came more and more rapidly, and after a while they began to merge into a roar; the counter couldn’t follow anymore. That was the moment to switch to the chart recorder. But when the switch was made, everyone watched in the sudden silence the mounting deflection of the recorder’s pen. It was an awesome silence. Everyone realized the significance of that switch; we were in the high intensity regime and the counters were unable to cope with the situation anymore. Again and again, the scale of the recorder had to be changed to accommodate the neutron intensity which was increasing more and more rapidly. Suddenly Fermi raised his hand. “The pile has gone critical,” he announced. No one present had any doubt about it. 82

  If anything unpredictable was going to happen, now was the moment. The “suicide squad” waited nervously, ready to pour their liquid cadmium onto the pile. “Fermi was cool as a cucumber,” an eyewitness wrote in his diary that night, “much more so than his associates who were excited or a bit scared.” 83 Fermi waited a long minute, then another, then another. When it seemed that the anxiety in the squash court had become too much to bear, he ordered the control rods back in. There was applause, but no one cheered. The excitement in that cold and shadowy room was felt and shared by everyone. Someone produced a bottle of Chianti in a straw basket and gave it to Fermi. He and the others sipped the Chianti from paper cups quietly in the midst of that dingy, gray-black room without a word or a toast. While many dreamed of releasing the power of the atom as a peaceful source of energy, everyone present knew that destruction was the ultimate aim of the experiment. No one gave expression to his thoughts and feelings, but each one knew the others too well not to sense what was in their minds. 84

  Compton left the squash court; walked down Ellis Avenue, through Hull Court, to his Eckart Hall office; and called Conant in Washington. “Jim,” he said, using coded language on an insecure telephone line, “you’ll be interested to know that the Italian navigator has just landed in the New World.” Conant’s voice betrayed his excitement. “Were the natives friendly?” he asked. “Everyone landed safe and happy,” replied Compton. 85

  The experiment brought to fruition years of theory and planning. Man had controlled the release of energy from the atomic nucleus for the first time, demonstrating dramatically that the chain reaction worked. An atomic bomb was no longer merely a theoretical possibility. Later that month President Roosevelt approved the expenditure of $400 million for uranium-separation plants and a plutonium-producing pile. At long last, Washington had decided to go all-out to build an atomic bomb.

  Those present beneath the west stands of Stagg Field that cold December day had witnessed a moment of history. Many had cherished the hope that something ultimately would make a chain reaction impossible—if impossible for them, it would be impossible also for the Germans. Now what they dreaded was on the way to reality. “We began to say things to one another,” an eyewitness said, “but there were no words that could express adequately just what we felt.” 86 Another eyewitness remembered:

  For some time we had known that we were about to unlock a giant; still, we could not escape an eerie feeling when we knew we had actually done it. We felt as, I presume, everyone feels who has done something that he knows will have very far-reaching consequences which he cannot foresee…. Even though our hearts were by no means light when we sipped the wine around Fermi’s pile, our fears were undefined, like the vague apprehensions of a man who has done something bigger than he ever expected to. 87

  There was no sign of emotion on Fermi’s face. His expression was so calm, it was hard to believe. The experiment had worked—it was as simple as that in his mind. Fermi told everyone to go home and get some sleep. Tomorrow they would get on with the next step. He was the cool man of action.

  Nearby, Szilard loitered silently, brooding about the past and the future. To him, Fermi’s calm reaction was unnerving. 88 Szilard now knew that an atomic bomb could be built. As everyone filed from the squash court into the cold evening, he and Fermi found themselves standing alone. “I shook hands with Fermi,” Szilard remembered, “and I said I thought this day would go down as a black day in the history of mankind.” 89

  That night a young physicist named John Manley came home from the Met Lab visibly shaken. His wife, Kay, was already in bed. She sensed that something was preoccupying her husband. “John came in very quietly,” she remembered many years later. “I knew that he was concerned about something. Something was affecting his thinking very strongly. He looked at me and said, ‘The world will never be the same.’ That was part of his thinking from then on.” 90

  CHAPTER 5

  Los Alamos

  THE ROAD NORTH from Santa Fe undulated gently for several miles along a string of hills and then opened out onto a valley floor more than seven thousand feet above sea level. On the west side of this valley road the land stretched out for miles to the gray, silver, and timber shades of the Jemez Mountains. In between, stunted brown tree-shrubs dotted the high desert land in countless tufts. At sunrise and sunset the wide valley was a spectrum of rich colors—the ever-shifting tans and purples of the desert—but sunrises and sunsets were just moments in the long days here where time and the land alike seemed almost infinite. On the east side of this valley road, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains stood bloodred in the distance, including majestic snowcapped North Truchas Peak, at 13,102 feet one of the highest in all of New Mexico. The air possessed that lucid clarity of the desert. In the wide-open country of the American Southwest, the eye could roll out to the distance and the soul could expand into the great spaces.

  At just this point a smaller road crossed the valley floor to the west. It spanned the Rio Grande, only a muddy stream here, and then started a slow climb toward the peaks of the Jemez Mountains, some darkened with trees, some lightened by scree. Large lava beds were visible, and black escarpments. Then salmon-colored cliffs towered skyward. The empty foreground filled suddenly with swellings of mesas, and abruptly trees—slim piñon pines and stubby juniper cedars—appeared over the canyons and the mesas. The air cooled and smells sharpened. The road rose, curved, cut back, then continued up, the mesas gradually taking shape. As the road crested the edge of one mesa, five suddenly appeared, splayed out from the gigantic volcanic mountain mass of the Jemez Caldera like the fingers of a hand sifting the sands of time. In the mesas’ walls were a honeycomb of hollowed caves whose ceilings had been blackened by the smoke of long-ago fires. Etched into them were drawings of animals, birds, masked beings, dancing men, symbols of rain and sun.

  The Pajarito Plateau opened like a huge fan from an arc of blue mountains. It was grooved by canyons that radiated out like the crudely drawn spokes of a wheel. The canyon walls rose through many-colored layers of hardened volcanic ash, rose and buff, like petrified waves. Some of the ridges between the canyons were narrow. Others were wide and flat, dotted with the mounds of pre-Columbian Indian villages and fields where Hispanic families cultivated beans in summer, returning in winter to their adobe homes along the Rio Grande. Atop one of the ridges of the Pajarito Plateau, where trees grew and the air smelled of pine needles, was the Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys. The school was named after the canyon that bordered the mesa to the south and was dotted with cottonwood trees (los alamos in Spanish) along the sandy trickle of its stream. All was quiet in this awesomely beautiful place. It was as far from the war-torn world as one could possibly be in September 1942.

  That month General Groves, who had just taken charge of the Manhattan Project, decided to create a new laboratory where the widely scattered work on bomb theory and design could be brought together and the fissionable material produced at Oak Ridge and Hanford could be assembled. There was also the issue of security: if scientists were brought together in one place, it would be a lot easier to control their talking and movements. As leader of this new lab, Groves wanted someone with an intellect broad and quick enough to
grasp a whole range of scientific problems, the imagination to suggest novel solutions to those problems, and the charisma to keep everyone working together as a team. He wanted someone who would get the “long-hairs” to deliver their “gadget” on time.

  Groves needed someone with enough authority and prestige to attract the best people available, ride herd on them, and coordinate their work. None of the Nobel laureates in physics could be spared to administrate. Lawrence was an outstanding experimental physicist and had gained good administrative experience running the Rad Lab at Berkeley, but he was committed to the electromagnetic separation of U-235 at Oak Ridge and could not be spared. Compton was another obvious choice, but he was already doing more than his share running the Met Lab at Chicago. And it would be unthinkable in Groves’s mind to assign the most secret military program to a foreign-born “enemy alien” such as Fermi, who was badly needed in Chicago, anyway.

  In the absence of a more important figure, Groves chose Oppenheimer. They first met when Groves visited Berkeley on an inspection trip in early October 1942. Strangely enough, they hit it off well together right from the start. Oppenheimer was straightforward, did not act like a typical scientist, and seemed to be realistic about the importance of security, a matter of grave concern to the general. Oppenheimer, a persuasive talker and a consummate actor, convinced Groves that he was his man.

  It was a most unorthodox choice. I. I. Rabi voiced the reaction of many physicists when he called it “a most improbable appointment. I was astonished.” 1 Oppenheimer had never managed anything bigger than a graduate seminar. He had no experience in organizing a large laboratory and had shown no predisposition for teamwork before. He was a theoretician, whereas the lab would be concerned primarily with experiments and engineering. He had no Nobel Prize to distinguish him—would other scientists follow his leadership? Then there was Oppenheimer’s left-wing past, which “included much that was not to our liking by any means,” as Groves later wrote. 2 Oppenheimer’s former fiancée, his wife, his brother, and his sister-in-law had all been members of the Communist Party—perhaps he himself had been, too. Neither Bush nor Conant was enthusiastic. Compton and Lawrence also had reservations about his capacity as an administrator. “Do you know a better man?” Groves asked them. 3

  Yet while the conservative Groves found Oppenheimer politically naive, he found nothing in his security file to doubt Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the United States, even though War Department investigators had characterized him as “strongly communistic” and had reported his connection “with radical organizations for years on and off the campus of the University of California.” 4 Groves was so confident of his judgment that he personally ordered Oppenheimer’s clearance, overruling the objection of Army Intelligence officers on the grounds that Oppenheimer was “absolutely essential to the Project.” 5 His order caused consternation and resentment among project security officers, but Groves wanted Oppenheimer—who else was there?—and forced through his choice. (The security people never forgave him or Oppenheimer for that act and continued to harass the director at every opportunity.) Groves barely knew Oppenheimer, yet he sensed that this man of great charm and persuasiveness could somehow bring together very difficult personalities and get them to work as a team. Groves’s intuition told him that Oppenheimer was a man equipped not only with scientific insight but with strong character and a capacity for decision. That was what Groves wanted, that was what he needed. There was no time to lose. The atomic bomb was only an idea on paper, and he had to make it a reality.

  It was a brilliant choice.

  The general and the physicist quickly developed a good working relationship. They always addressed each other formally as “General Groves” and “Dr. Oppenheimer”—an indication of the constant if subdued contest between them, each admiring yet suspicious of the other’s abilities. Groves handled Oppenheimer with more respect and deference than he did any other project scientist. Oppenheimer, who could be cutting with other physicists, patiently answered every question the general asked. He had not expected to like Groves—the military culture, after all, was definitely not his cup of tea—yet he found himself grudgingly admiring the general. “Groves is a bastard,” he would say privately, “but he’s a straightforward one.” 6 They were an odd and improbable couple locked in a strange union that superseded quarrels and irritation—married, first and last, to the success of the project. They got along because each saw the other as the way to fulfill his ambition to achieve personal glory. “That combination made the thing work,” Rabi astutely observed. 7

  Groves and Oppenheimer’s first task together was to choose a site for the bomb lab. Oppenheimer remembered the mesa of Los Alamos, where he had spent a happy summer riding horseback and camping. The characteristics that had made the location a place of glory to him—its remoteness and isolation, but also its spare, intense beauty—was especially important to the aesthete in Oppenheimer, who knew the quality of the scientists whom he hoped to attract there and believed they would respond to surroundings that stretched and enriched the spirit.

  Oppenheimer proposed this “little gray home in the west” 8 to Groves, and together they drove up to the Ranch School in an unmarked car on November 16, 1942. They arrived there late in the afternoon. A light snow was falling. Despite the cold November wind, the boys were out on the playing fields in corduroy shorts. The founder of the school, Ashley Pond, was an enthusiastic advocate of the vigorous outdoor life and did not even believe in heated sleeping quarters. Oppenheimer and Groves remained outside the gates, taking in the fresh mountain air as they pored over maps and looked out over the surrounding countryside. Log houses and school buildings were scattered amid pastures and cropland. It was a lovely place, this clearing in the pine trees 8,500 feet above sea level. The flat green mesa, separated from the rest of the plateau by the vertical walls of two deep canyons, offered perfect isolation. After taking it all in, General Groves said simply, “This is the place.” 9

  The only obstacle to his decision was A. J. Connell, the headmaster of the Los Alamos Ranch School, where forty-three wealthy boys had been sent, mostly from the East, to be educated and toughened up. When an army officer told the headmaster that the school had come to the end of its days and would be taken over, Connell replied, “You must be mistaken. The property is not for sale.” The boys were permitted to finish the school year, but that was it. By the time they left, in the early spring of 1943, MPs were already guarding the mesa. Connell retired to Santa Fe a broken man, where he died two years later. That is how the secret lab known as Site Y or the Hill came to be.

  On March 16, 1943, Oppenheimer left California by train for New Mexico. He arrived in Santa Fe a few days later and took up residence at 109 East Palace Avenue in Santa Fe under the alias Mr. Bradley until Kitty and Peter joined him and together they moved up to the Hill in May. Oppenheimer’s plan was to build an atomic bomb there with just thirty other physicists. It would be a small community. They would live in the schoolmasters’ houses and eat at the main lodge. What labs were needed would be squeezed in between the canyon rim and the little pond that graced the front of the lodge. As the realities of the immense challenge set in, however, Oppenheimer would be forced to recruit more physicists, as well as mathematicians, chemists, metallurgists, ordnance experts, machinists—all sorts of personnel. By war’s end, Los Alamos would secretly employ more than four thousand civilian and two thousand military personnel.

  Oppenheimer’s original estimate had been low because of inexperience and his lack of ability to understand the dimensions involved. He had foreseen a theoretical physics laboratory whose main function would be to determine the critical mass, ensure against predetonation in assembly, and perform the necessary subcritical experiments to test the theory. Oppenheimer had given little thought to the engineering aspects of a weapon, which would prove to be awesome.

  The laboratory started out with nothing except the library books that the Ranch School boys had read and the
equipment they had used to go horseback riding. The only link with the outside world was a hand-cranked Forest Service phone line. Water was scarce and electricity was intermittent. At the center of Los Alamos was Ashley Pond, named after the school’s founder. To its east stood Fuller Lodge, the main dining hall. Across an open field was the Big House, which served as a dormitory for arriving scientists. Between the main road and the mesa’s southern rim were the laboratories, dubbed the Tech Area, one- and two-story white clapboard and green sheetrock buildings scattered among tall ponderosa pines. The streets created were unpaved and unnamed.

  The scientists who would work in the Tech Area had many questions to answer: How many neutrons were released each time a uranium nucleus fissioned? How were they absorbed or scattered? How did the neutrons from one fission produce a second fission when they hit another uranium nucleus? How was a critical amount of fissionable material assembled fast enough to create a powerful explosion? What would happen during the explosion? The questions sounded very academic, but this was no college campus: a fenced guarded by MPs surrounded the Tech Area, and special white badges were required for admission.

  Oppenheimer knew the physicists he needed would not readily pass up work at established war projects such as radar at MIT, the proximity fuse at Johns Hopkins, or sonar at San Diego to come to this unknown site in the desert. They would come only if America’s top physicists were coming, too. So Oppenheimer recruited the stars first, and the others followed fast. Some he terrified by stressing the prospect of a Nazi atomic bomb. Others he attracted by his descriptions of the immense beauty of New Mexico. But to all he imparted the feeling of how exciting it would be to participate in the pioneering work. “He spoke with a kind of mystical earnestness that captured our imagination,” recalled one recruit. 10 By describing the projected work as crucial to the war effort and exerting a kind of “intellectual sex appeal,” 11 as another recruit put it, Oppenheimer managed to get almost everyone he wanted. “Oppenheimer was the best recruiter and salesman I’ve ever seen,” said one who eagerly bought his sales pitch. “He expressed his enthusiasm for the project, and aroused ours.” 12 The list of current and future stars was astonishing: Robert Bacher, Robert Christy, Richard Feynman, Donald Hornig, Edwin McMillan, Philip Morrison, Norman Ramsey, Emilio Segrè, Victor Weisskopf, and Robert Wilson, to name just a few.